The History of Shaving

For thousands of years man has been fighting the unending battle with his stubborn
facial hair. His face has about 25,000 whiskers, which are as hard and rough as a piece of
copper wire of the same thickness, and grow at a rate of five to six inches (125 to 150
mm) per year. An average man will spend in excess of 3,000 hours of his life in the act of
shaving.

The ancient Egyptians are known to have shaved their beards and heads, a custom later
adopted by the Greeks and Romans around 330 B.C. during the reign of Alexander the Great.

This practice was encouraged as a defensive measure for soldiers, preventing the enemy
from grasping their hair in hand-to-hand combat. As the practice of shaving spread through
most of the world, men of unshaven societies became known as "barbarians",
meaning the "unbarbered". The practice of women shaving legs and underarms,
developed much later.

In early times man scraped the hair away with crude weapons such as stone, flint, clam
shells and other sharpened materials. Later, he experimented with bronze, copper and iron
razors. In more recent centuries he used the steel straight razor (aptly called the
"cut-throat" for obvious reasons). For hundreds of years razors maintained a
knife-like design and needed to be sharpened by the owner or a barber with the aid of a
honing stone or leather strop. These "weapons" required considerable skill by
the user to avoid cutting himself badly.